Three weeks ago, natural gas was under attack as an environmental scourge, the subject of a damning Oscar-nominated documentary and scathing investigative articles in The New York Times.

But now, gas is reclaiming some of its mantle in the media as an inexpensive, abundant, relatively benign fuel facing a brilliant economic future — and receiving glowing coverage from The New York Times.

All it took was a nuclear accident.

By riveting the world’s attention with images of exploding reactors and fears of globe-circling radiation plumes, the nuclear crisis in Japan has offered a public-relations breather to the U.S. gas industry and perhaps has made gas’s hazards seem remote, theoretical or puny in comparison.

Gas critics say the need remains urgent to rein in the industry’s risks, especially the dangers of drinking-water pollution tied to the extraction technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Controversy has swelled in the past couple of years over the practice, which got a starring role in the movie “Gasland.”

“I don’t think the public is going to stand for anything less than protecting our water resources, be it from gas or nuclear reactors,” said Damon Moglen, director of the climate and energy program at Friends of the Earth.

But gas’s risks aren’t the ones dominating the headlines and airwaves these days.

Instead, the Times’s business section on Tuesday declared natural gas “a safer bet” because of the dangers posed by nuclear, oil and coal. The article came just three weeks after the Times published a series of investigative stories alleging that gas companies’ fracking and drilling practices could be dumping unknown amounts of radioactive waste into drinking-water supplies in Pennsylvania.

Tuesday’s story never explicitly refers to the earlier articles and mentions only in passing that “natural gas is not without problems.”

Meanwhile, the Times and other news organizations are predicting that the economic fallout from the Japanese disaster could bring a boom in global demand for gas. That’s partly because Japan itself might need to import more liquefied natural gas to replace its lost nuclear generating capacity, the Christian Science Monitor reported Tuesday.

At the same time, the prospect of tighter nuclear regulations in other countries — including the United States — means that gas companies are ever more bullish about demand for their fuel, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

Natural gas futures have risen 11 percent since the earthquake and tsunami struck Japan on March 11, Bloomberg noted. It also quoted Exelon Corp. CEO John Rowe, whose company owns the United States’ largest group of nuclear plants, as predicting that “natural gas is queen for a decade, maybe two.”

In the same article, Thomas D. O’Malley, chairman of oil refinery partner PBF Energy Co., said: “Nuclear, it’s toast. Who’s going to sign a permit today? Absolutely no one after this disaster.”

John Pinkerton, chairman and chief executive officer of Texas-based natural gas company Range Resources, told POLITICO that the Japanese crisis is highlighting nuclear power’s dangers in the same way that last year’s BP spill called attention to the risks of deepwater oil drilling.

Compared with the potentially worldwide impact of a nuclear accident, any pollution arising from a natural-gas accident “is pretty localized,” said Pinkerton, whose company uses fracking to extract gas from shale deposits in states such as Pennsylvania and Texas. He said he expects the gap between gas and nuclear to widen even further in the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster.

“Because of what’s happening in Japan, people are going to say we need more safeguards [with nuclear],” Pinkerton said. “And so the cost of that source of energy, I think, is going to increase pretty dramatically in the case of new builds.”

Range Resources has shared in the post-quake natural gas boom, with its stock price up roughly 14 percent since March 10, as of Wednesday afternoon. The company also won a victory on the fracking front Tuesday, when Texas regulators said EPA was wrong to blame the company for contaminating families’ drinking water wells.

In recent years, natural gas and nuclear power have both contended as potential climate-friendlier replacements for coal in electric power generation, with at least grudging acceptance from some environmental groups. Nuclear power’s advantages include the fact that reactors produce few, if any, carbon emissions, while its downsides include high expenses and the lack of any U.S. strategy to store the radioactive leftovers. Gas, meanwhile, can boast of abundant domestic supplies and low costs, plus emissions that at least are significantly cleaner than coal’s.

“With nuclear, the reward is high but the risk is high,” Pinkerton said. “With natural gas, the rewards are not as high because it’s a hydrocarbon, but on the other end of it the risk is substantially less.”

Moglen, from Friends of the Earth, argues that both energy sources belong in the past as “20th-century” fuels, compared with 21st-century alternatives such as solar, wind and increased energy efficiency. He adds that as far as public opinion is concerned, the threat of fracking chemicals appearing in drinking water in the U.S. is just as alarming as the radioactive contamination showing up in Japanese food and tap water.

But the political debate in Washington may be driving in a different direction. President Barack Obama has championed both natural gas and nuclear power — along with solar, wind, efficiency and “clean” coal — in his call for a clean energy strategy. And attempts to impose EPA regulation on fracking were already facing tough sledding in a Congress dominated by talk of loosening rules and expanding domestic energy supplies.

The latest regulation proposal is the so-called FRAC Act that Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) reintroduced last week. Similar proposals have floundered in the past two Congresses, said Travis Windle, a spokesman for the Marcellus Shale Coalition. He predicted a similar outcome this time, regardless of how the Japanese crisis ends.

“I don’t think this will in any material way affect the FRAC Act moving through Congress or getting its first-ever committee meeting,” Windle said. “It wasn’t going to happen anyway.”